Various stent designs are known in the art. These stents form vascular prostheses fabricated from biocompatible materials. Stents are typically used to expand and maintain patency of hollow vessels, such as blood vessels or other body orifices. To this end, the stent is often placed into a hollow vessel of a patient's body in a contracted delivery configuration and is subsequently expanded by suitable means, such as by a balloon catheter, to a deployed configuration.
A stent often comprises a stent body that is expandable from the contracted to the deployed configuration. A common drawback of such a stent is that the stent decreases in length, or foreshortens, along its longitudinal axis as it expands. Such shortening is undesirable because, in the deployed configuration, the stent may not span the entire area inside a vessel or orifice that requires expansion and/or support.
It therefore would be desirable to provide a stent that experiences reduced foreshortening during deployment.
It also would be desirable to provide a stent that is flexible, even in the contracted delivery configuration.
It would be desirable to provide a stent having radial stiffness in the expanded deployed configuration sufficient to maintain vessel patency in a stenosed vessel.